Abstract
Although still in print and on the shelves of libraries, most of the poetry of Michael Drayton is no longer either read or taught. If the canon of English Literature has preserved anything of him, it has saved not him but one poem (and an extremely powerful one): a mere sonnet, a mere fourteen lines, “Since there’s no helpe, come let us kisse and part.”1 For our purposes here, it is significant that Drayton lived from 1563–1631 and that, hence, his life overlapped with that of the great allegorist, Spenser, and extended well beyond that time: 1631 was also the year that John Donne died. Allegory, by then, was no longer in fashion.
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Notes
All references to the poetry of Michael Drayton are to the Muses’ Library edited by John Buxton (Harvard: Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell: Ithaca, 1964), p. 235n.
Quoted by John Buxton in the Introduction to his edition of the poems of Drayton, p. xli.
See, for instance, M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edition (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1988).
Angus Fletcher, p. 2.
M. H. Abrams, p. 92.
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: New York, 1958), p. 44.
Fletcher, p. 2.
Fletcher, p. 23.
The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Cornell: Ithaca, 1979), p. 156.
J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Allegories,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard English Studies, No. 9 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 361, p. 368. Such references to Word becoming Flesh I consider to be a major deviation from the principles of Deconstruction; hence, I say, “uncharacteristically.”
Krieger, “A Waking Dream,” in Bloomfield, p. 4.
Krieger, pp. 14–15.
“Allegorical Language” in Bloomfield, p. 25.
See the especially useful A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms by Richard A. Lanham, Second Edition (California, 1991).
See Fletcher, P. 7.
Again, see Fletcher, p. 85.
The Pocket Aquinas, ed. Vernon J. Bourke (Washington Square Press: New York, 1960).
My own language here is, once again, theological. The effective cause of anything is what comes prior to the thing caused: the effective cause of my own creation was the moment of my conception. The final cause of my creation is still to be discovered: the final cause is in the thought of the First Mover and involves not how I began but for what end will I become.
Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Cornell: Ithaca, 1983), p. 172 and passim.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 73.
See especially Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (Yale: New Haven, 1986), Chapter V, for an extremely interesting treatment of Ovidianism in the Renaissance. See, too, Clark Hülse, Metamorphic Verse (Princeton, 1981), particularly Chapter V.
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Ross, H. (1994). Michael Drayton’s ‘Ideas’ and the ‘Where’ and the ‘Whence’ of Allegory. In: Kronegger, M., Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Allegory Old and New. Analecta Husserliana, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1946-7_6
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